American culture was founded precisely by the people who were not "rational or calm about sex" (and a few other such things), after they were chased out of Europe.
Obviously this is partly a result of individualist consumerism run amok, but I don't think the demonisation of 2nd wave feminists has helped - often in a throwing out the baby with the bathwater kind of way. You don't have to agree with everything (or even most) of what Andrea Dworkin wrote, for instance, to find some decent challenges to a libertarian view of prostitution. As you say, most people don't /read/ outside of quotes and soundbites.
[While I think bell hooks is well worth reading at length, I suspect her continued mass popularity over other feminist academics from the same generation is that she's often anecdotal rather than rigorous, easily quoted, and at her worst slips into broad, bromidic claims that the reader can project a lot of personal meaning onto].
I really agree about bell hooks - I have seen so much tepid runoff from people who've skimmed her work and seem to regurgitate it in a way that reminds me of Facebook jpg inspirational quotes. I know the work has more value than that but I feel like I can even tell when someone has been influenced by someone else who is influenced by bell hooks.
I think that's partly due to confusion of information and morality. Reading 2nd wave perspectives, I don't agree with them all, but I can generally see where they're coming from. If I had to consider them a moral stance, though, to be followed 100% or else, I'd reject them. We need to re-discover the art of learning from people who aren't on our side.
What's Dworkin's "decent challenge"? Dworkin's "Pornography" is a half-insane screed that, for example, takes an 80s Penthouse shoot that featured lasers as a backdrop and claimed that the women in the pictures were being tortured by deadly heat lasers. And that level of insane projection is absolutely typical of her work. And she gets a free pass for this kind of nonsense because she's supposedly channeling some kind of primal female rage that represents a supposed truth that our society is blind to. In my opinion, she's not better than the emotionally-confused shouting class on social media today. The only difference is that Dworkin could stretch her paranoid ramblings out to book length.
I'm seeing a frightening number of too online, ostensibly "progressive", zillennials who seem hell bent on making George Orwell's fictional Junior Anti-Sex League a reality. Consider the evidence:
They don't mostly read books, or if they do, it's rarely anything more challenging than Harry Potter or young adult fiction.
They seem to live to get other people in trouble with the authorities (however defined) - hall monitor kid culture. Half of them seem to want to unironically be Pavel Morozov.
And arguably worst of all, they act like 17th century New England puritans when it comes to the topic of normal sexual behavior. And if that sexual behavior is anything more than two people of exactly the same age having a dutiful ten minute hump in the dark after signing consent forms? Look out.
This part of the future that Orwell predicted in the past was forty years late, but I think it's finally getting here. And it sucks.
It reminds me of the criminal justice system's way of making ordinary things illegal so that police can question or arrest anyone who seems suspicious. I am 20, my girlfriend is 19, and my (center-left-ish) politics are unpopular at my school, so of course somebody made a post on campus social media about me and my "much younger partner." We are a year and a fucking half apart.
Most people didn't take this seriously, thank God, but the fact that anyone would use an 18-month age difference to suggest that the older party in that relationship is a predator is utterly insane.
"[T]he fact that anyone would ... is utterly insane."
I certainly sympathize with you. But It's not insane. It has a point. Which is *my* point. The fact that ostensible "adults in the room" (wherever) are being cattle-driven to (a) support/allow and even (b) do these insane things is *the* thing to bore in on. Hard. Especially the "insane" things that are happening in Congress, universities, corporations, and many other organizations. These people in authority and/or with the bullhorns are not stupid. They are controlled -- with or without their knowledge. If you knee-jerk scoff at this, you really need to observe, and read, more widely, and think, for longer.
So we can finally get past being "amazed" and "shocked" at how "insane" it is.
A lot of it, I think, really is just irrational and based off fear. As far as this age gap thing, it would be terrible if it gained serious influence, and like other social justice things maybe it will, but right now it hasn't, and the extreme version of it I'm describing isn't taken that seriously even by most woke people. The mainstream position among progressives my age is more along the lines of wanting people to be in the "same life stage", which makes some pretty unreasonable prescriptions but is not nearly to the point of, say, condemning a relationship between a college freshman and sophomore. Also, knowing a lot of people who are much more conservative (anti-age gap) on this issue than I am, they are often otherwise pretty reasonable and are not trying to undermine society. So I feel comfortable saying the most extreme people about this are deranged in a way that isn't common even among mainstream progressives.
I see what you mean, and agree. But I'm not arguing about the merits of positions, e.g. saying which are sane and which are "crazy". I'm saying that these extreme conflicts about sex, and the growing magnitudes of ebb and flow over recent decades, exist by design. Sexual feelings are a deep well of power tapped by bad actors.
Not sure if I'm "Yglesias-style," but yeah, my campus is insane. I'm known for free speech activism, which of course means I must hate minorities, women, the alphabet people, etc. despite being trans myself.
Human sexuality reveals a fundamental unfairness that foil humans' best attempts at egalitarianism. No matter how much we might protest against it, large-scale data (which we now have thanks to dating apps) reveal that women are sexually depreciating assets, most men aren't considered attractive, and some races are considered less desirable than others.
Sex-negative progressive zillenials are at least honest enough to realize that their egalitarian ideals are at odds with their sexual desires, and are at least consistent, if weakly so. Human sexuality was heavily policed in the past to limit competition; why is the woke version worse?
Because in the past, religious and social policing of human sexuality was attempted precisely because people actually understood, and respected nature's power, especially how powerful human sexuality really is.
The woke version is so much worse for exactly the reason you described: it denies nature, and attempts to curb human sexuality in ways that would fit a five year old child's definition of what and isn't *fair*. Not only is it stupid, it's antithetical to nature itself.
The reactionary version also denied nature: it forced men to settle down with one woman permanently and stultified women's earning prospects in order to make low status men they would never otherwise choose look more attractive.
You're thinking about a very thin wedge of specific Christian policing of sex, and a fairly short lived one at that. For far more of our history, cultures and societies policed sex the way the Wahhabis do in Saudi Arabia: men can, and do, take multiple wives, and the sexuality of those wives are policied by forbidding them to leave the house lest they ever get pregnant with another man's child.
Here again, nature rules, because men are stronger than women, and can (and often have) strong arm them through force to do what they want.
All of this makes much more sense when we see how chimpanzees actually behave in the wild. We dress up our own animal instincts, we have brains to recognize them, a conscience to want to soften the sharp edges, but they never, ever really change.
We defy nature, which is fine, but when you try to ignore it, look out.
Person A: Here's a description of something, called X, which I think both exists, and is broadly true, with no moral evaluation of own attached to the observation itself.
Person B: Why do you think X is good? Why are you defending X?
I dunno, look at India right now. Christians don't exactly have a lot of cultural power there.
For that matter, I suspect that a lot of human society is what happens when betas get together to divvy the females and other goodies up for themselves.
That's what you get when people "deconstruct" the trappings of an existing philosophy without understanding its assumptions. Same self-righteousness, different flag. And once the inquisition starts, the only way to be safe is to be just as eager in denouncing those degenerate sex-havers. Or go even further....
There are a few curious issues at play in all this. I understand the need to humanize sex workers and understand they are people with real jobs, but until high school counselors advise students to go into sex work and parents are proud of their kid's career stripping in Vegas, it's never going to be free of some amount of stigma.
As always, part of this comes back to tech. When I was growing up PG-13 movies (and R movies, if I could sneak off to watch them) were where I saw boobs. There was literally no other opportunity to see them. Even when I got older - the internet didn’t really take off until I was in my 20s - porn was still fairly rare and a pain in the neck to acquire. Regular movies was where naked women were at.
Now though, it’s right there, all of it, all the porn ever made, on my phone that I’m typing with now. I’ve got to imagine that kids today associated sex with porn, naked breasts with porn, sensuality with porn. And porn shouldn’t be on tv, and nobody should be pressured to act in one. There’s a logic there, maybe.
I think it's logical that online porn may have made a difference in the generations. If reports about the effects of ubiquity of porn are true (there's the rub, of course), I suspect I would find it much more fraught to be a teenage girl trying to figure out sex today than in my day.
Would it make me "scared" of sex to wonder if potential sex partners expected porn-level proficiency and no awkwardness? a willingness to "play" at rough sex? a body that looked and smelled (i.e. didn't smell) like the bodies in porn? In all honesty, I think I would be scared.
Because of popular culture more generally, think I'd also be far more aware than I was at 17 or 18 of just how many men had contempt for women. I grew up in a patriarchal religious culture that was sexist. But the idealization of motherhood and "good" daughters had the ironic effect of veiling from me just how a portion of men in the world felt about women in general. Then they invented the internet and I got a new education in my 20s and 30s.
Totally agree. The ubiquity of pornography has been a bitter lesson for young women about the darkness inherent in male sexuality, a lesson that I was spared until later in life, after I had had positive sexual experiences. Nevertheless, pornography culture is like a cloud hanging over every sex act I have ever engaged in, taking experiences that I found at the time to be fulfilling or agentic at least and causing me to question whether in fact they were/are ugly and disturbing. I cannot even imagine being introduced to sex as inherently misogynistic the way that young people now are. Young women are responding to this in various ways, which I need not enumerate here, that are at once tragic and unsurprising.
Hmm...interesting. My youngest daughter hasn't even dated and she's 20. She's been more exposed to social media than the older kids. I'm puzzled by her sex negative attitude and am a loss for where it comes from.
1000% I feel sure that if this was how I learned about "sex" rather than through actual experiences, I would've forced myself to become a lesbian, even though I'm not attracted to women. I'm not even joking there.
As a father of teenage daughters, I very much appreciate your (novel for me) insight, re "more fraught".
My daughters are much more sex negative than I was and that's made for some easier parenting in the early going, but it's something that needs to be turned around eventually, and I'm clueless where to start.
In a world of such ubiquitous porn, how can sex be made less fraught for them?
Anything that you would try as the father of teenage daughters would be pretty creepy tbh. There’s not a lot you can do about it except model a healthy sexual relationship with your wife or SO, to the extent that’s a thing that can be modeled healthily
This is a good point. I've got nothing against sex scenes in movies, and, more to the point, I think the death of the erotic thriller is tragic. I saw a criticism of the MCU that it lacked gay characters when in fact, it is an almost entirely sexless universe. It lacks straights, too. We've got hot people in stretchy, revealing clothes... there should be some sex. I leave it the hands of whoever makes the next X-Men movie.
That said, the proliferation of easy-to-access porn is not a good thing either. There's a huge difference between sex scenes in movies and porn, but I think the issues get intertwined in people's minds. But the problem is, if we don't have healthy sex scenes between consenting adults, the only images of sex our kids (and here I mean teenagers and college kids, not little kids) get exposed to are that of porn and extreme sex acts. And that creates a distorted picture of what sex is and how most people experience it.
Once you understand that "progressive", "conservative", etc. as currently practiced are not coherent philosophies but super-tribes, that is, ad hoc coalitions of disparate smaller tribes that don't necessarily have much in common and may not even really like each other all that much, everything starts to make sense.
I can't bear to watch violence in movies. So, for the moment a person hits another person in a movie I shut my eyes. I also can't stand all the teeth brushing (why do so many movies do that?)
Same for sex scenes--if you don't like them, don't watch them.
Oh god yes the teeth-brushing thing. (The only thing I really disliked about the otherwise excellent movie Stranger Than Fiction: it really should have come with a content warning about that. :P) Very much relate.
I think now more than ever, America needs a return to the raunchy R rated teen comedies of the 1980's. I'm seriously tempted to start a Gofundme to film an even raunchier remake of "Porky's" or "Losin' It" that would take the incoherent attitudes described perfectly into account. I think it would likely cause almost as much controversy with these people as an actual snuff film would for GenX normies.
Maybe it'll break the spell, or maybe I'll simply get dogpiled on Twitter and lynched. I suppose there's only one real way to find out, right?
I disagree with the "no sex scenes" argument, but I think it can be coherent with pro-sex work progressive beliefs. The rub is whether a worker is intending to get involved in sex work.
1. If a woman is an accountant, she should not be made to feel like providing sexual attention to her boss. If the owner of the accounting firm told her in the interview that she needed to wear skimpy clothes to work, we would say that's bad, even though you could say she's just being asked to wear skimpy clothes for money, and can say no if she wants. She *could* just find another accounting firm that doesn't have this requirement, but I think we all agree she shouldn't have to.
2. If a woman is a sex worker, she's made a choice to go into a line of work in which she does sexual things for money.
The question is whether actors are in the first category and second category. If it fair to an actresses that, to take certain acting jobs, they have to consent to getting mostly-naked and sexual in front of dozens of strangers, and then be broadcast to movie's audience?
I personally think acting is a trade that doesn't fit neatly into these categories - the whole point is you have to do a lot of things that you, personally, wouldn't do, in order to portray a character. But I think it's possible to have the opposite view coherently even if you think true sex work is fine.
Well said. Another consideration is that the pressure on movie actresses is far greater than in the examples you gave. Neither accountants nor sex workers have to rely on one big break to make their careers.
Couldn't this be seen as a positive thing, though? If in the past actresses were given their big break through sex/nudity scenes, then fewer of these scenes means that actresses have fewer sexualized roles.
If anything, having a sex scene (for actresses, not actors), at least until the 1990s, pretty much ended one's ascension, or marked one's only notable appearance in Hollywood films.
It's worth pointing out that even though there are sex scenes in only a small percentage of *movies*, there's a whole lot of sex scenes in cable series, with some like "The Girlfriend Experience" or "Euphoria" bordering on erotica. And these scenes are shot with regular actors, not porn performers.
True, but not unheard of. I'd say two* of the biggest actresses of the last decade really broke through with sex scenes (Margot Robbie and Alexander Daddario.) There are a lot more who have admitted to feel pressure to do sex or nude scenes that they didn't want to do.
I did read it, but I'm not sure I understand the relevance to this as an ethical quesion. If only 1.2% of accounting firms required their accountants to wear skimpy dresses, would you be OK with that?
Do accountants take jobs that last six months and which specifically delineate the exact requirements of the job when being hired, including the attire they might wear? Again, consent obliterates your objection - if actresses don't want to do nudity or appear in a sex scene, they can simply turn down that role and choose another. And if you want to say that there's something inherently conservative in making job choices that way, congratulations, you're a Marxist.
The purpose of my accountant comparison is to demonstrate that asking for consent is often not sufficient in the workplace.
Our society has decided that, in the workplace, there are certain things that can not be done even if consented to. I cannot ask my employee to consent to work for less than minimum wage, and I cannot ask my employee to consent wear a bikini to her accounting job. I can't say, "if you don't like it, apply to one of the 99% of firms that don't have these requirements."
I don't understand your last sentence. I would've said objections to these hiring standards is libertarian. It's coherent to say, "people should be able to enter any job contract they want as long as there's informed consent", but I don't think that's the argument you're making.
I dunno, doesn't Hooters have a uniform for waitresses? I suppose I could impose a similar policy for an accounting firm as a weird branding exercise, but I question the quality of the accountants you'd get.
Yes, Hooters is a good example. There are jobs in which sexual performance is a necessary part of the role. Strippers is another. The relevant question is whether "non-pornographic actor" is one of these.
Sales is example of a fuzzier one. You could imagine a manager requiring female employees to dress sexually to bring in accounts. There's a reasonable argument that this would slightly improve business outcomes, but at the margin, most of us think that sales employees in non-sexual industries shouldn't be asked to dress sexily. The ethical question, for most, wouldn't hinge on efficacy.
The "no sex scenes" people are hoping for a world in which "actor" is like "sales." We sacrifice a bit of an outcome (say, fading to black), to prevent situations in which actors feel compelled to do sexual things they don't want to do in order to take certain jobs.
Again, I'd argue that actors *should* be in the category where we make the Hooters, "necessary to the role" exception. But unlike Freddie, I think this is a reasonable thing to disagree about.
In general I don’t buy the argument that consent “obliterates” moral problems. I don’t think that the consent of the involved parties is actually the only moral force at play in a situation like this. I think some sexual acts are fundamentally immoral no matter how much we consent to it.
For instance — this is a deliberately extreme example offered only to demonstrate the point that maybe there is a morality beyond consent; I DO NOT THINK SEX ACTS IN MOVIES ARE IN ANY WAY THE SAME AS THIS EXAMPLE PLEASE DO NOT MISREAD ME — there was that consensual cannibalism case in Germany, which was carried out for the purposes of mutual sexual gratification. (here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes ) To me, murdering and eating someone is wrong, and my moral judgment on the matter is not altered whatsoever by the fact that the victim consented.
Again, to be clear, sex scenes in a movie are NOT THE SAME AS MURDEROUS SEXUAL CANNIBALISM, but that’s not my point — my point is that, for me, no consent does not “obliterate” objections and it is not the end of all moral argument.
If two people disagree about whether consent is or should be the end of all moral argument, then probably they shouldn’t be arguing about sex scenes in movies at all — they should be backing up and arguing whether there is sexual morality beyond consent.
You think there isn’t and Tyler thinks there is and I think that’s a legit moral disagreement for any two people to have.
I, for one, read the statistic but don't remotely believe it. My perception is that virtually all films not intentionally made for children, even those rated PG-13, have at least one gratuitous sex scene where apparently naked people are grinding away at each other. The people promulgating this statistic must be taking the position that a scene is not "sexual" unless it causes the movie to be rated X or unrated.
I think you're on to a common moral intuition, but it may be hard to support at the logical level.
If I understand correctly, it would be reasonable to advertise for a sex worker who would both perform sex work and do taxes, but it would be unreasonable to advertise for an accountant who would both do taxes and perform sex work.
Yes, I think the key is that they're separate, so that women can decide to "be an accountant" (or "be an actor") without also feeling like they'll be at a disadvantage if they don't perform sex work (or sexual simulation.)
The purpose of this is to keep options open for women who *want* to do sex work, without closing any doors for women who don't. My core point against Freddie's piece is that these goals are compatible and not necessarily incoherent, as he argues.
There are a lot of tough workplace issues like this. Gig work is another. I'd love for everyone who prefers to be a gig worker to be able to do that, and for everyone who prefers to be a W2 to be able to do that. In the real world, I think there's a trade-off though - opening up the gig work spigot makes it harder for people who want to be W2s to do that, since some jobs transition from W2 to gig.
To the extent that 1.2% of acting roles having sex scenes increases to, say, 10%, those are roles that actors who aren't comfortable with sex scenes don't get. And because most actors aren't in a position to pick and choose roles, that means, effectively, that many more actors would have to be OK with those roles to be in the industry.
I think you're making a reasonable point, but I also think that being an accountant has nothing to do with sex whatsoever, while being an actress is ridiculously broad and highly variable. Ultimately, each actress job, each role, is its own separate job with its own separate requirements. You can be a successful actress without doing nude scenes. Ask...
Sarah Jessica Parker
Anna Kendrick
Megan Fox
Jessica Alba
Mila Kunis
Julia Roberts
There are tons of roles that don't require it. As for simulated sex, that's a lot more common, but again, it's not required. It would, I imagine, make it far, far harder to have a successful career if those sorts of roles were refused. And in both cases it's possible to use body doubles.
Now, that said, I suspect there is a lot of pressure, especially for certain types of movies, to be willing to appear naked and simulate sex acts, and given the relatively massive power differential between the filmmakers and, say, a less established actress (the power differential exists because many, many women want to be actresses, and there are only so many roles available), I don't think it's crazy to feel queasy about the pressure. I wouldn't say that's a reason to ban simulated sex or nudity, but...well, folks can disagree.
The final piece of this, for me, comes from the more conservative side of my nature: Hollywood has long been a place where there is some level of nudity and simulated sex acts. If you want to be a Hollywood actress, you already know that going in. You made a choice. If you are not comfortable with doing those scenes, you either have the self-possession to remain true to your principles, knowing that it will limit your roles, or you choose roles over principles, but in either case, it was a choice. No one owes you a Hollywood career at all, let alone one that plays out entirely the way you want it to, where every role you are offered is a role you greatly desire. No one owes you a career free from pressure to do things you would rather not do when the role calls for it (though I certainly feel for those who are in that position; life is hard and it sucks to be faced with those decisions).
Yes. Not all cinema requires sex scenes, but if that’s the part it’s called acting and they’re very well paid. They’re hiring you to act a specific screenplay to tell a specific story, and it’s not about them.
And there’s nothing wrong with topless accounting, if that’s clearly listed in the job description. They have skimpy outfit maid services and stuff. I imagine they are paid a premium. Shit, we have bikini espresso here. I don’t feel like people are being exploited here if everyone is of age.
That attitude seems to be that sex work should be consigned to *those* kind of people, and the moment it involves someone we normies can actually identify with, then it's coercive and harassment. It is absolutely vital that anybody engaging in transactional sex or anything adjacent to it do so under circumstances that are 100% consensual. But I don't think drawing a bright line that cannot be crossed between sex work and not-sex work is the way to foster that. (Even within the sex trade, there's a spectrum from outright prostitution to no-contact stripping.) There is a such thing as trades that are sometimes involves things that are sex work-adjacent and sometimes not, and film acting and modeling would be examples. An actor can certainly have rules saying they'll never do nudity or a sex scene, and many do. But that should not hold as a rule for the entire industry.
On the sex scene thing: I think part of it, though probably not the full answer, might be how many progressive thought leaders came from fanfic circles. Fanfic writers, infamously, mostly cannot write sex scenes for shit, so "please just fade to black, your sex scene does not add what you think it does" became common advice.
But even if it was good advice for that particular context, it is a terrible universal principle for people who know what the fuck they're doing.
Oh, that's funny, because in my experience fanfic is often full of sex scenes. I think some readers treat it as a place to explore their sexual preferences (though I would argue they should do so in real life, not just in fic!).
It's so bizarre and sad how young progressives have these hang-ups. If only they knew how great sex was even in your forties with your spouse of 20 years... sex is such an important part of life and they're going to regret missing out.
Considering how many women's bodies work, regardless of the skill of their lovers, and how great the sex is they have while most fertile, they just won't have the best sex of their lives until perimenopause. Not all, of course.
"...how many progressive thought leaders came from fanfic circles."
Really?!? At least in my imaginings, I see "progressive thought leaders" as sort of glorified hall monitors, forever reminding us that "Teacher says...." or putting up their hands in the air to be called on. "Strivers" as another commenter nicely put it.
Not overly dramatic, self-obsessed and rather socially awkward anime kids.
Trust me, there is a lot of conformity in the fanfic writer world, especially for the ones who are also on Tumblr. (I mean, some writers are suspect because they *don't* imagine characters who are heterosexual in the original material to be secretly gay or "queer" or whatever.) And like in other areas of life, you build a following by parroting all of the faddish trends of the time, whether those trends are in your fanfics or real-life politics.
I think the actual root cause is that both groups take their identity from marginalization. The fanfic writer connection is a little more distant, but I think sci-fi and fantasy are attractive forms of escapism for socially marginalized people, and are also rich sources of fanfiction because there's a lot of worldbuilding but there's still space for a fanfic writer's ideas.
A lot of fanfic writers are overeducated too - often they are pretty good writers and have college/advanced degrees. But as mentioned above, they have little social capital in real/offline life and thus have to manufacture it from fic writing and Tumblr hierarchies. Hence the conformity and group-think.
I think the problem isn't the fanfic, it's the "antis" who conglomerate parasitically onto them. A group of self-appointed morality police and "feelings yakuza" who conflate their being uncomfortable with moral wrong, and confuse smutfic for RL sex.
Today's left really IS just the evangelicals from the '80s and '90s with the Bible filed off. This weird, incoherent attitude towards sex is very reminiscent of evangelicals.
i mean, "the age gap discourse" was more or less created out of whole cloth by a bunch of young democrat strivers who hoped to gain internships in return for doing a gay panic to prevent a primary challenge against ways & means chair richie neal
To get all Camille Paglia for a second, it's also impossible to not notice these fucked up attitudes about sex coincide with other trends that try to deny nature, some of which we do not talk about here.
From my own observations, I think that's rooted half in the Rousseau type nonsense about nature being wholly benevolent that comes back every few generations or so, and half rooted in fear: fear of their own bodies, fear of the unknown, and fear that there are things that cannot and will never go away simply because people are afraid of them.
Eventually, they too will learn it's possible to defy nature, but foolish to deny nature, because nature always wins in the end.
If I could time travel and edit one person out of history it would be Rousseau. I'd skip right over Hitler or Stalin and go straight for him.
I work in education, and his nonsense has totally poisoned the field. It is so awful being a teacher right now. These kids are horrible people, and admin has decided that this is a good thing. Why, It's all Rousseau. Emile should be the book conservatives try to pull from libraries. This thing where we have to let kids become the worst version of themselves because any form of correction somehow corrupts their pure nature is straight from him. This thing where we don't explicitly teach ideas because if they don't discover them through opaque activities is him. We have students who can't read because phonics is corrupting. We have students who can't do arithmetic because remembering math rules is imperious. We have students who we won't keep from harming others because doing so is "trying to change" them and that implies theres something wrong with them.
This is interesting because the natural state of a child is generally “a little shit”; Pratchett had the right of it when he noted that children’s laughter sounds delightful until you see what they’re laughing about.
There are a lot of enlightenment thinkers I really dislike. I wouldn’t go so far as throwing out Locke, because I do like our nation and our constitution, but I remember texting a poli-sci prof friend of mine while riots were breaking my town to say DAMNIT HOBBES WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG
I remember CHAZ being a natural experiment that kind of proved Hobbes right. Basically, it was supposed to be a Temporarily Autonomous Zone (per Peter Lamborn Wilson) with cleared of police or authority figures. Only, into that vacuum stepped self-appointed CHAZ "Security" who were basically thugs and ended up killing several young people. If that's your alternative, I'll stick with the Seattle PD, for all of their problems.
I think a lot of it just stems from laziness. Teachers favor low standards because it makes their job easier if you don’t have to make anyone work (and they don’t have a ton of control over the students anyway).
I have a 21 year old sister in law who's never had a relationship or been on a date. She never even talks about boys/potential romantic partners like you would expect from a young college student surrounded by available suitors.
In addition to the all the pop culture reasons Freddie lays out above: it's the phones. Approaching or propositioning someone IRL so much more fraught and risky than swiping or DMing (especially as a man in the post #MeToo era), so it's easier to just not.
My youngest sister was like that too. But she met a dude (in person, unplanned, totally randomly) when she was 23 and they've been together for over 5 years now. Sometimes people are just late bloomers.
I agree with your premise, Freddie, but wanted to add a layer to the dating discourse.
The Penn article Freddie shared is pretty interesting. The author characterizes young women's tiktok complaints about being straight more as dissatisfaction with modern dating and hookup culture, and suggests that women complain that if they were lesbians, then they would be able to find "someone willing to respond to texts within the hour, someone willing to put in emotional labor, someone who wasn’t allergic to commitment—someone more like themselves." (She has another great line that in modern hookup culture, "sex is first base, holding hands is second, and meeting the parents is third.")
Based on the summary, the author seems to suggest that one factor is a grass is greener effect -- in actuality, women are chasing rare high status guys in a way that a pickup artist might recognize, and are using their "heteropessisism" ironically or just don't realize that they wouldn't be able to get a relationship with the highest status lesbians any more than they can get a monogamous relationship with the highest status straight guys. I would say that a second factor is that without clear dating rules, some of the limiters have fallen off on guys' horniness and desire for a wide variety of sexual partners.
A number of straight people are ENTIRELY too optimistic about their prospects on "the other side." Queer dating its its own series of...let's call them situations.
American culture was founded precisely by the people who were not "rational or calm about sex" (and a few other such things), after they were chased out of Europe.
Obviously this is partly a result of individualist consumerism run amok, but I don't think the demonisation of 2nd wave feminists has helped - often in a throwing out the baby with the bathwater kind of way. You don't have to agree with everything (or even most) of what Andrea Dworkin wrote, for instance, to find some decent challenges to a libertarian view of prostitution. As you say, most people don't /read/ outside of quotes and soundbites.
[While I think bell hooks is well worth reading at length, I suspect her continued mass popularity over other feminist academics from the same generation is that she's often anecdotal rather than rigorous, easily quoted, and at her worst slips into broad, bromidic claims that the reader can project a lot of personal meaning onto].
I really agree about bell hooks - I have seen so much tepid runoff from people who've skimmed her work and seem to regurgitate it in a way that reminds me of Facebook jpg inspirational quotes. I know the work has more value than that but I feel like I can even tell when someone has been influenced by someone else who is influenced by bell hooks.
I think that's partly due to confusion of information and morality. Reading 2nd wave perspectives, I don't agree with them all, but I can generally see where they're coming from. If I had to consider them a moral stance, though, to be followed 100% or else, I'd reject them. We need to re-discover the art of learning from people who aren't on our side.
What's Dworkin's "decent challenge"? Dworkin's "Pornography" is a half-insane screed that, for example, takes an 80s Penthouse shoot that featured lasers as a backdrop and claimed that the women in the pictures were being tortured by deadly heat lasers. And that level of insane projection is absolutely typical of her work. And she gets a free pass for this kind of nonsense because she's supposedly channeling some kind of primal female rage that represents a supposed truth that our society is blind to. In my opinion, she's not better than the emotionally-confused shouting class on social media today. The only difference is that Dworkin could stretch her paranoid ramblings out to book length.
I'm seeing a frightening number of too online, ostensibly "progressive", zillennials who seem hell bent on making George Orwell's fictional Junior Anti-Sex League a reality. Consider the evidence:
They don't mostly read books, or if they do, it's rarely anything more challenging than Harry Potter or young adult fiction.
They seem to live to get other people in trouble with the authorities (however defined) - hall monitor kid culture. Half of them seem to want to unironically be Pavel Morozov.
And arguably worst of all, they act like 17th century New England puritans when it comes to the topic of normal sexual behavior. And if that sexual behavior is anything more than two people of exactly the same age having a dutiful ten minute hump in the dark after signing consent forms? Look out.
This part of the future that Orwell predicted in the past was forty years late, but I think it's finally getting here. And it sucks.
Perfect reference to the Junior Anti-Sex League; bravo
The zigzag madness has been cultivated, protected, and promoted for seven decades for the wider political purposes of blackmail. Period.
It reminds me of the criminal justice system's way of making ordinary things illegal so that police can question or arrest anyone who seems suspicious. I am 20, my girlfriend is 19, and my (center-left-ish) politics are unpopular at my school, so of course somebody made a post on campus social media about me and my "much younger partner." We are a year and a fucking half apart.
Most people didn't take this seriously, thank God, but the fact that anyone would use an 18-month age difference to suggest that the older party in that relationship is a predator is utterly insane.
"[T]he fact that anyone would ... is utterly insane."
I certainly sympathize with you. But It's not insane. It has a point. Which is *my* point. The fact that ostensible "adults in the room" (wherever) are being cattle-driven to (a) support/allow and even (b) do these insane things is *the* thing to bore in on. Hard. Especially the "insane" things that are happening in Congress, universities, corporations, and many other organizations. These people in authority and/or with the bullhorns are not stupid. They are controlled -- with or without their knowledge. If you knee-jerk scoff at this, you really need to observe, and read, more widely, and think, for longer.
So we can finally get past being "amazed" and "shocked" at how "insane" it is.
A lot of it, I think, really is just irrational and based off fear. As far as this age gap thing, it would be terrible if it gained serious influence, and like other social justice things maybe it will, but right now it hasn't, and the extreme version of it I'm describing isn't taken that seriously even by most woke people. The mainstream position among progressives my age is more along the lines of wanting people to be in the "same life stage", which makes some pretty unreasonable prescriptions but is not nearly to the point of, say, condemning a relationship between a college freshman and sophomore. Also, knowing a lot of people who are much more conservative (anti-age gap) on this issue than I am, they are often otherwise pretty reasonable and are not trying to undermine society. So I feel comfortable saying the most extreme people about this are deranged in a way that isn't common even among mainstream progressives.
I see what you mean, and agree. But I'm not arguing about the merits of positions, e.g. saying which are sane and which are "crazy". I'm saying that these extreme conflicts about sex, and the growing magnitudes of ebb and flow over recent decades, exist by design. Sexual feelings are a deep well of power tapped by bad actors.
Yeah, I could buy that.
As someone who grew up as a campus "conservative," it's astonishing to me that Yglesias-style leftists are now feeling campus pressure to conform.
Not sure if I'm "Yglesias-style," but yeah, my campus is insane. I'm known for free speech activism, which of course means I must hate minorities, women, the alphabet people, etc. despite being trans myself.
Human sexuality reveals a fundamental unfairness that foil humans' best attempts at egalitarianism. No matter how much we might protest against it, large-scale data (which we now have thanks to dating apps) reveal that women are sexually depreciating assets, most men aren't considered attractive, and some races are considered less desirable than others.
Sex-negative progressive zillenials are at least honest enough to realize that their egalitarian ideals are at odds with their sexual desires, and are at least consistent, if weakly so. Human sexuality was heavily policed in the past to limit competition; why is the woke version worse?
Because in the past, religious and social policing of human sexuality was attempted precisely because people actually understood, and respected nature's power, especially how powerful human sexuality really is.
The woke version is so much worse for exactly the reason you described: it denies nature, and attempts to curb human sexuality in ways that would fit a five year old child's definition of what and isn't *fair*. Not only is it stupid, it's antithetical to nature itself.
The reactionary version also denied nature: it forced men to settle down with one woman permanently and stultified women's earning prospects in order to make low status men they would never otherwise choose look more attractive.
You're thinking about a very thin wedge of specific Christian policing of sex, and a fairly short lived one at that. For far more of our history, cultures and societies policed sex the way the Wahhabis do in Saudi Arabia: men can, and do, take multiple wives, and the sexuality of those wives are policied by forbidding them to leave the house lest they ever get pregnant with another man's child.
Here again, nature rules, because men are stronger than women, and can (and often have) strong arm them through force to do what they want.
All of this makes much more sense when we see how chimpanzees actually behave in the wild. We dress up our own animal instincts, we have brains to recognize them, a conscience to want to soften the sharp edges, but they never, ever really change.
We defy nature, which is fine, but when you try to ignore it, look out.
In polygamous societies, the majority of marriages were and are monogamous.
Do you think that a situation of polygyny with men strong-arming women is desirable?
Person A: Here's a description of something, called X, which I think both exists, and is broadly true, with no moral evaluation of own attached to the observation itself.
Person B: Why do you think X is good? Why are you defending X?
Nature is completely amoral. That's it.
I dunno, look at India right now. Christians don't exactly have a lot of cultural power there.
For that matter, I suspect that a lot of human society is what happens when betas get together to divvy the females and other goodies up for themselves.
That's what you get when people "deconstruct" the trappings of an existing philosophy without understanding its assumptions. Same self-righteousness, different flag. And once the inquisition starts, the only way to be safe is to be just as eager in denouncing those degenerate sex-havers. Or go even further....
There are a few curious issues at play in all this. I understand the need to humanize sex workers and understand they are people with real jobs, but until high school counselors advise students to go into sex work and parents are proud of their kid's career stripping in Vegas, it's never going to be free of some amount of stigma.
As always, part of this comes back to tech. When I was growing up PG-13 movies (and R movies, if I could sneak off to watch them) were where I saw boobs. There was literally no other opportunity to see them. Even when I got older - the internet didn’t really take off until I was in my 20s - porn was still fairly rare and a pain in the neck to acquire. Regular movies was where naked women were at.
Now though, it’s right there, all of it, all the porn ever made, on my phone that I’m typing with now. I’ve got to imagine that kids today associated sex with porn, naked breasts with porn, sensuality with porn. And porn shouldn’t be on tv, and nobody should be pressured to act in one. There’s a logic there, maybe.
Right and now we all have to pretend that we don't like seeing boobs, even though wanting to do so is perfectly healthy
Yup. It’s fine to want to see boobs on the screen so long as it’s in a gangbang. Or something.
That, while simultaneously thinking that John Valby's "Gangbang Song" from the movie "Losin' It" is Deeply Problematic, and should probably be banned.
It really makes you wonder how these people would (or even could?) absorb what's going on in a film like "Boogie Nights".
I think it's logical that online porn may have made a difference in the generations. If reports about the effects of ubiquity of porn are true (there's the rub, of course), I suspect I would find it much more fraught to be a teenage girl trying to figure out sex today than in my day.
Would it make me "scared" of sex to wonder if potential sex partners expected porn-level proficiency and no awkwardness? a willingness to "play" at rough sex? a body that looked and smelled (i.e. didn't smell) like the bodies in porn? In all honesty, I think I would be scared.
Because of popular culture more generally, think I'd also be far more aware than I was at 17 or 18 of just how many men had contempt for women. I grew up in a patriarchal religious culture that was sexist. But the idealization of motherhood and "good" daughters had the ironic effect of veiling from me just how a portion of men in the world felt about women in general. Then they invented the internet and I got a new education in my 20s and 30s.
Totally agree. The ubiquity of pornography has been a bitter lesson for young women about the darkness inherent in male sexuality, a lesson that I was spared until later in life, after I had had positive sexual experiences. Nevertheless, pornography culture is like a cloud hanging over every sex act I have ever engaged in, taking experiences that I found at the time to be fulfilling or agentic at least and causing me to question whether in fact they were/are ugly and disturbing. I cannot even imagine being introduced to sex as inherently misogynistic the way that young people now are. Young women are responding to this in various ways, which I need not enumerate here, that are at once tragic and unsurprising.
Hmm...interesting. My youngest daughter hasn't even dated and she's 20. She's been more exposed to social media than the older kids. I'm puzzled by her sex negative attitude and am a loss for where it comes from.
Maybe this is it.
1000% I feel sure that if this was how I learned about "sex" rather than through actual experiences, I would've forced myself to become a lesbian, even though I'm not attracted to women. I'm not even joking there.
As a father of teenage daughters, I very much appreciate your (novel for me) insight, re "more fraught".
My daughters are much more sex negative than I was and that's made for some easier parenting in the early going, but it's something that needs to be turned around eventually, and I'm clueless where to start.
In a world of such ubiquitous porn, how can sex be made less fraught for them?
Anything that you would try as the father of teenage daughters would be pretty creepy tbh. There’s not a lot you can do about it except model a healthy sexual relationship with your wife or SO, to the extent that’s a thing that can be modeled healthily
This is a good point. I've got nothing against sex scenes in movies, and, more to the point, I think the death of the erotic thriller is tragic. I saw a criticism of the MCU that it lacked gay characters when in fact, it is an almost entirely sexless universe. It lacks straights, too. We've got hot people in stretchy, revealing clothes... there should be some sex. I leave it the hands of whoever makes the next X-Men movie.
That said, the proliferation of easy-to-access porn is not a good thing either. There's a huge difference between sex scenes in movies and porn, but I think the issues get intertwined in people's minds. But the problem is, if we don't have healthy sex scenes between consenting adults, the only images of sex our kids (and here I mean teenagers and college kids, not little kids) get exposed to are that of porn and extreme sex acts. And that creates a distorted picture of what sex is and how most people experience it.
Once you understand that "progressive", "conservative", etc. as currently practiced are not coherent philosophies but super-tribes, that is, ad hoc coalitions of disparate smaller tribes that don't necessarily have much in common and may not even really like each other all that much, everything starts to make sense.
'Whatever Those Guys say, do the opposite" shall be the whole of the law. Schizmogenesis is a hell of a drug.
Like I’m 100% going to vote for Biden and believe in lots of wealth redistribution and LGBT rights, but not this prudish nonsense or safety culture.
"[T]o be politics instead of to do them" nails it. All of it.
I can't bear to watch violence in movies. So, for the moment a person hits another person in a movie I shut my eyes. I also can't stand all the teeth brushing (why do so many movies do that?)
Same for sex scenes--if you don't like them, don't watch them.
Oh god yes the teeth-brushing thing. (The only thing I really disliked about the otherwise excellent movie Stranger Than Fiction: it really should have come with a content warning about that. :P) Very much relate.
I think now more than ever, America needs a return to the raunchy R rated teen comedies of the 1980's. I'm seriously tempted to start a Gofundme to film an even raunchier remake of "Porky's" or "Losin' It" that would take the incoherent attitudes described perfectly into account. I think it would likely cause almost as much controversy with these people as an actual snuff film would for GenX normies.
Maybe it'll break the spell, or maybe I'll simply get dogpiled on Twitter and lynched. I suppose there's only one real way to find out, right?
I disagree with the "no sex scenes" argument, but I think it can be coherent with pro-sex work progressive beliefs. The rub is whether a worker is intending to get involved in sex work.
1. If a woman is an accountant, she should not be made to feel like providing sexual attention to her boss. If the owner of the accounting firm told her in the interview that she needed to wear skimpy clothes to work, we would say that's bad, even though you could say she's just being asked to wear skimpy clothes for money, and can say no if she wants. She *could* just find another accounting firm that doesn't have this requirement, but I think we all agree she shouldn't have to.
2. If a woman is a sex worker, she's made a choice to go into a line of work in which she does sexual things for money.
The question is whether actors are in the first category and second category. If it fair to an actresses that, to take certain acting jobs, they have to consent to getting mostly-naked and sexual in front of dozens of strangers, and then be broadcast to movie's audience?
I personally think acting is a trade that doesn't fit neatly into these categories - the whole point is you have to do a lot of things that you, personally, wouldn't do, in order to portray a character. But I think it's possible to have the opposite view coherently even if you think true sex work is fine.
Well said. Another consideration is that the pressure on movie actresses is far greater than in the examples you gave. Neither accountants nor sex workers have to rely on one big break to make their careers.
What are you talking about? 1.2% of movies from 2010 to 2020 contained any sex at all. What pressure?
Couldn't this be seen as a positive thing, though? If in the past actresses were given their big break through sex/nudity scenes, then fewer of these scenes means that actresses have fewer sexualized roles.
If anything, having a sex scene (for actresses, not actors), at least until the 1990s, pretty much ended one's ascension, or marked one's only notable appearance in Hollywood films.
It's worth pointing out that even though there are sex scenes in only a small percentage of *movies*, there's a whole lot of sex scenes in cable series, with some like "The Girlfriend Experience" or "Euphoria" bordering on erotica. And these scenes are shot with regular actors, not porn performers.
Most actresses don't make their big break with sex scene/nude scenes.
True, but not unheard of. I'd say two* of the biggest actresses of the last decade really broke through with sex scenes (Margot Robbie and Alexander Daddario.) There are a lot more who have admitted to feel pressure to do sex or nude scenes that they didn't want to do.
*Kim Kardashian probably doesn't count
And no one is owed the multimillion dollar career of major actresses, either. They aren’t victims.
so did you not read the 1.2% statistic or is it simply inconvenient to you
I did read it, but I'm not sure I understand the relevance to this as an ethical quesion. If only 1.2% of accounting firms required their accountants to wear skimpy dresses, would you be OK with that?
Do accountants take jobs that last six months and which specifically delineate the exact requirements of the job when being hired, including the attire they might wear? Again, consent obliterates your objection - if actresses don't want to do nudity or appear in a sex scene, they can simply turn down that role and choose another. And if you want to say that there's something inherently conservative in making job choices that way, congratulations, you're a Marxist.
The purpose of my accountant comparison is to demonstrate that asking for consent is often not sufficient in the workplace.
Our society has decided that, in the workplace, there are certain things that can not be done even if consented to. I cannot ask my employee to consent to work for less than minimum wage, and I cannot ask my employee to consent wear a bikini to her accounting job. I can't say, "if you don't like it, apply to one of the 99% of firms that don't have these requirements."
I don't understand your last sentence. I would've said objections to these hiring standards is libertarian. It's coherent to say, "people should be able to enter any job contract they want as long as there's informed consent", but I don't think that's the argument you're making.
I dunno, doesn't Hooters have a uniform for waitresses? I suppose I could impose a similar policy for an accounting firm as a weird branding exercise, but I question the quality of the accountants you'd get.
Yes, Hooters is a good example. There are jobs in which sexual performance is a necessary part of the role. Strippers is another. The relevant question is whether "non-pornographic actor" is one of these.
Sales is example of a fuzzier one. You could imagine a manager requiring female employees to dress sexually to bring in accounts. There's a reasonable argument that this would slightly improve business outcomes, but at the margin, most of us think that sales employees in non-sexual industries shouldn't be asked to dress sexily. The ethical question, for most, wouldn't hinge on efficacy.
The "no sex scenes" people are hoping for a world in which "actor" is like "sales." We sacrifice a bit of an outcome (say, fading to black), to prevent situations in which actors feel compelled to do sexual things they don't want to do in order to take certain jobs.
Again, I'd argue that actors *should* be in the category where we make the Hooters, "necessary to the role" exception. But unlike Freddie, I think this is a reasonable thing to disagree about.
You can’t? I feel like bikini accounting could totally be a thing. Some tax prep places are shadier than that!
To wit:
https://youtu.be/xqRa1uV2-KA?si=KEDpHhrx6Zrk3I2r
https://youtu.be/3r8MmDNAP5g?si=RyWFqOpqPP7xVOp4
In general I don’t buy the argument that consent “obliterates” moral problems. I don’t think that the consent of the involved parties is actually the only moral force at play in a situation like this. I think some sexual acts are fundamentally immoral no matter how much we consent to it.
For instance — this is a deliberately extreme example offered only to demonstrate the point that maybe there is a morality beyond consent; I DO NOT THINK SEX ACTS IN MOVIES ARE IN ANY WAY THE SAME AS THIS EXAMPLE PLEASE DO NOT MISREAD ME — there was that consensual cannibalism case in Germany, which was carried out for the purposes of mutual sexual gratification. (here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes ) To me, murdering and eating someone is wrong, and my moral judgment on the matter is not altered whatsoever by the fact that the victim consented.
Again, to be clear, sex scenes in a movie are NOT THE SAME AS MURDEROUS SEXUAL CANNIBALISM, but that’s not my point — my point is that, for me, no consent does not “obliterate” objections and it is not the end of all moral argument.
If two people disagree about whether consent is or should be the end of all moral argument, then probably they shouldn’t be arguing about sex scenes in movies at all — they should be backing up and arguing whether there is sexual morality beyond consent.
You think there isn’t and Tyler thinks there is and I think that’s a legit moral disagreement for any two people to have.
But nobody’s doing that. It’s an extreme example that isn’t relevant.
I, for one, read the statistic but don't remotely believe it. My perception is that virtually all films not intentionally made for children, even those rated PG-13, have at least one gratuitous sex scene where apparently naked people are grinding away at each other. The people promulgating this statistic must be taking the position that a scene is not "sexual" unless it causes the movie to be rated X or unrated.
I think you're on to a common moral intuition, but it may be hard to support at the logical level.
If I understand correctly, it would be reasonable to advertise for a sex worker who would both perform sex work and do taxes, but it would be unreasonable to advertise for an accountant who would both do taxes and perform sex work.
Yes, I think the key is that they're separate, so that women can decide to "be an accountant" (or "be an actor") without also feeling like they'll be at a disadvantage if they don't perform sex work (or sexual simulation.)
The purpose of this is to keep options open for women who *want* to do sex work, without closing any doors for women who don't. My core point against Freddie's piece is that these goals are compatible and not necessarily incoherent, as he argues.
There are a lot of tough workplace issues like this. Gig work is another. I'd love for everyone who prefers to be a gig worker to be able to do that, and for everyone who prefers to be a W2 to be able to do that. In the real world, I think there's a trade-off though - opening up the gig work spigot makes it harder for people who want to be W2s to do that, since some jobs transition from W2 to gig.
To the extent that 1.2% of acting roles having sex scenes increases to, say, 10%, those are roles that actors who aren't comfortable with sex scenes don't get. And because most actors aren't in a position to pick and choose roles, that means, effectively, that many more actors would have to be OK with those roles to be in the industry.
I think you're making a reasonable point, but I also think that being an accountant has nothing to do with sex whatsoever, while being an actress is ridiculously broad and highly variable. Ultimately, each actress job, each role, is its own separate job with its own separate requirements. You can be a successful actress without doing nude scenes. Ask...
Sarah Jessica Parker
Anna Kendrick
Megan Fox
Jessica Alba
Mila Kunis
Julia Roberts
There are tons of roles that don't require it. As for simulated sex, that's a lot more common, but again, it's not required. It would, I imagine, make it far, far harder to have a successful career if those sorts of roles were refused. And in both cases it's possible to use body doubles.
Now, that said, I suspect there is a lot of pressure, especially for certain types of movies, to be willing to appear naked and simulate sex acts, and given the relatively massive power differential between the filmmakers and, say, a less established actress (the power differential exists because many, many women want to be actresses, and there are only so many roles available), I don't think it's crazy to feel queasy about the pressure. I wouldn't say that's a reason to ban simulated sex or nudity, but...well, folks can disagree.
The final piece of this, for me, comes from the more conservative side of my nature: Hollywood has long been a place where there is some level of nudity and simulated sex acts. If you want to be a Hollywood actress, you already know that going in. You made a choice. If you are not comfortable with doing those scenes, you either have the self-possession to remain true to your principles, knowing that it will limit your roles, or you choose roles over principles, but in either case, it was a choice. No one owes you a Hollywood career at all, let alone one that plays out entirely the way you want it to, where every role you are offered is a role you greatly desire. No one owes you a career free from pressure to do things you would rather not do when the role calls for it (though I certainly feel for those who are in that position; life is hard and it sucks to be faced with those decisions).
Yes. Not all cinema requires sex scenes, but if that’s the part it’s called acting and they’re very well paid. They’re hiring you to act a specific screenplay to tell a specific story, and it’s not about them.
And there’s nothing wrong with topless accounting, if that’s clearly listed in the job description. They have skimpy outfit maid services and stuff. I imagine they are paid a premium. Shit, we have bikini espresso here. I don’t feel like people are being exploited here if everyone is of age.
That attitude seems to be that sex work should be consigned to *those* kind of people, and the moment it involves someone we normies can actually identify with, then it's coercive and harassment. It is absolutely vital that anybody engaging in transactional sex or anything adjacent to it do so under circumstances that are 100% consensual. But I don't think drawing a bright line that cannot be crossed between sex work and not-sex work is the way to foster that. (Even within the sex trade, there's a spectrum from outright prostitution to no-contact stripping.) There is a such thing as trades that are sometimes involves things that are sex work-adjacent and sometimes not, and film acting and modeling would be examples. An actor can certainly have rules saying they'll never do nudity or a sex scene, and many do. But that should not hold as a rule for the entire industry.
On the sex scene thing: I think part of it, though probably not the full answer, might be how many progressive thought leaders came from fanfic circles. Fanfic writers, infamously, mostly cannot write sex scenes for shit, so "please just fade to black, your sex scene does not add what you think it does" became common advice.
But even if it was good advice for that particular context, it is a terrible universal principle for people who know what the fuck they're doing.
Oh, that's funny, because in my experience fanfic is often full of sex scenes. I think some readers treat it as a place to explore their sexual preferences (though I would argue they should do so in real life, not just in fic!).
It's so bizarre and sad how young progressives have these hang-ups. If only they knew how great sex was even in your forties with your spouse of 20 years... sex is such an important part of life and they're going to regret missing out.
This is probably my own ignorance but I thought fanfic was just a pretext for erotica.
Yeah, pretty much!
Hey, I never said the advice was followed.
"...even in your forties..."
Considering how many women's bodies work, regardless of the skill of their lovers, and how great the sex is they have while most fertile, they just won't have the best sex of their lives until perimenopause. Not all, of course.
Is this not well known?
"...how many progressive thought leaders came from fanfic circles."
Really?!? At least in my imaginings, I see "progressive thought leaders" as sort of glorified hall monitors, forever reminding us that "Teacher says...." or putting up their hands in the air to be called on. "Strivers" as another commenter nicely put it.
Not overly dramatic, self-obsessed and rather socially awkward anime kids.
Trust me, there is a lot of conformity in the fanfic writer world, especially for the ones who are also on Tumblr. (I mean, some writers are suspect because they *don't* imagine characters who are heterosexual in the original material to be secretly gay or "queer" or whatever.) And like in other areas of life, you build a following by parroting all of the faddish trends of the time, whether those trends are in your fanfics or real-life politics.
I'm sure there is little of conformity. Not sure how that leads to overlap between "progressive thought leaders" and "fanfic writers".
I think the actual root cause is that both groups take their identity from marginalization. The fanfic writer connection is a little more distant, but I think sci-fi and fantasy are attractive forms of escapism for socially marginalized people, and are also rich sources of fanfiction because there's a lot of worldbuilding but there's still space for a fanfic writer's ideas.
Not sure how that gets us to "progressive thought leader" which seems to be a euphemism for "overeducated striver".
A lot of fanfic writers are overeducated too - often they are pretty good writers and have college/advanced degrees. But as mentioned above, they have little social capital in real/offline life and thus have to manufacture it from fic writing and Tumblr hierarchies. Hence the conformity and group-think.
I think the problem isn't the fanfic, it's the "antis" who conglomerate parasitically onto them. A group of self-appointed morality police and "feelings yakuza" who conflate their being uncomfortable with moral wrong, and confuse smutfic for RL sex.
Today's left really IS just the evangelicals from the '80s and '90s with the Bible filed off. This weird, incoherent attitude towards sex is very reminiscent of evangelicals.
i mean, "the age gap discourse" was more or less created out of whole cloth by a bunch of young democrat strivers who hoped to gain internships in return for doing a gay panic to prevent a primary challenge against ways & means chair richie neal
Now *that's* what I call "doing politics" lol
To get all Camille Paglia for a second, it's also impossible to not notice these fucked up attitudes about sex coincide with other trends that try to deny nature, some of which we do not talk about here.
From my own observations, I think that's rooted half in the Rousseau type nonsense about nature being wholly benevolent that comes back every few generations or so, and half rooted in fear: fear of their own bodies, fear of the unknown, and fear that there are things that cannot and will never go away simply because people are afraid of them.
Eventually, they too will learn it's possible to defy nature, but foolish to deny nature, because nature always wins in the end.
If I could time travel and edit one person out of history it would be Rousseau. I'd skip right over Hitler or Stalin and go straight for him.
I work in education, and his nonsense has totally poisoned the field. It is so awful being a teacher right now. These kids are horrible people, and admin has decided that this is a good thing. Why, It's all Rousseau. Emile should be the book conservatives try to pull from libraries. This thing where we have to let kids become the worst version of themselves because any form of correction somehow corrupts their pure nature is straight from him. This thing where we don't explicitly teach ideas because if they don't discover them through opaque activities is him. We have students who can't read because phonics is corrupting. We have students who can't do arithmetic because remembering math rules is imperious. We have students who we won't keep from harming others because doing so is "trying to change" them and that implies theres something wrong with them.
This is interesting because the natural state of a child is generally “a little shit”; Pratchett had the right of it when he noted that children’s laughter sounds delightful until you see what they’re laughing about.
Romanticism is the most pernicious luxury belief that I can think of.
There are a lot of enlightenment thinkers I really dislike. I wouldn’t go so far as throwing out Locke, because I do like our nation and our constitution, but I remember texting a poli-sci prof friend of mine while riots were breaking my town to say DAMNIT HOBBES WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG
Everyone loves democracy until the war of all against all breaks out.
I remember CHAZ being a natural experiment that kind of proved Hobbes right. Basically, it was supposed to be a Temporarily Autonomous Zone (per Peter Lamborn Wilson) with cleared of police or authority figures. Only, into that vacuum stepped self-appointed CHAZ "Security" who were basically thugs and ended up killing several young people. If that's your alternative, I'll stick with the Seattle PD, for all of their problems.
CHAZ was a specific topic on which my friend and I discussed the rightness of Hobbes hah
I think a lot of it just stems from laziness. Teachers favor low standards because it makes their job easier if you don’t have to make anyone work (and they don’t have a ton of control over the students anyway).
I have a 21 year old sister in law who's never had a relationship or been on a date. She never even talks about boys/potential romantic partners like you would expect from a young college student surrounded by available suitors.
In addition to the all the pop culture reasons Freddie lays out above: it's the phones. Approaching or propositioning someone IRL so much more fraught and risky than swiping or DMing (especially as a man in the post #MeToo era), so it's easier to just not.
My youngest sister was like that too. But she met a dude (in person, unplanned, totally randomly) when she was 23 and they've been together for over 5 years now. Sometimes people are just late bloomers.
I agree with your premise, Freddie, but wanted to add a layer to the dating discourse.
The Penn article Freddie shared is pretty interesting. The author characterizes young women's tiktok complaints about being straight more as dissatisfaction with modern dating and hookup culture, and suggests that women complain that if they were lesbians, then they would be able to find "someone willing to respond to texts within the hour, someone willing to put in emotional labor, someone who wasn’t allergic to commitment—someone more like themselves." (She has another great line that in modern hookup culture, "sex is first base, holding hands is second, and meeting the parents is third.")
Based on the summary, the author seems to suggest that one factor is a grass is greener effect -- in actuality, women are chasing rare high status guys in a way that a pickup artist might recognize, and are using their "heteropessisism" ironically or just don't realize that they wouldn't be able to get a relationship with the highest status lesbians any more than they can get a monogamous relationship with the highest status straight guys. I would say that a second factor is that without clear dating rules, some of the limiters have fallen off on guys' horniness and desire for a wide variety of sexual partners.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/what-tiktok-reveals-about-gen-z-dating-hyperindividualism-heteropessimism
Thanks for that info––important qualifying perspectives.
A number of straight people are ENTIRELY too optimistic about their prospects on "the other side." Queer dating its its own series of...let's call them situations.